Showing all posts in Caribbean

Ready for a hike Jim and I in the front It was very beautiful and very powerful
to look up when you were in between
It was actually pretty deep here, I couldn’t touch the bottom,
we are both holding ourselves up
Hahaha, I love our facial expressions:)

My birthday was the only day we could go on the one adventure that we had decided on before our vacation in Dominican Republic. So we woke up early, had some breakfast and got picked up by a car. We were the only ones from Cabarete, so we sat there alone for a half hour looking at the nature of DR. After we had picked up people from two other hotels in Puerto Plata, we were finally on our way to the 27 waterfalls of Rio Damajaqua.
There was a 25 minute walk up the mountain. Jim and I could probably do it in half, we just kept waiting for people, but it was nice to walk in the jungle so I didn’t mind. We had chosen the bigger package of sliding and jumping down 12 waterfalls. The water wasn’t that high this day so some falls we had to just slide instead of jump down. I thought this was a perfect activity for turning 30. The last waterfall had a bigger slide that we all went down and then you could choose to climb up again and jump straight down. I was the first one to do this and let me tell you that I was actually a bit scared. Good scared. Adrenaline pumping scared. If I have decided on something, then I’m gonna do it. Some people backed out but that is just not an option for me. I took some deep breaths and then just stepped off the cliff.
I have to say that I am proud of Jim and myself. It wasn’t a scary experience overall, it wasn’t the craziest adventure, but still, a lot of people would be scared to do this or they just don’t have the health for it. So, I am proud of us. We had fun!

The two photos on the top and the two bottom ones are taken by me with my cameras, but the photos from the waterfalls is taken by our groups “paparazzi” with not the greatest camera, as you can see. I have tried to make them look better though, but that was hard. We got a cd with 200 pictures but none of the photos was of us two. He must have given us the wrong copy, so I have been emailing back and forth with the company and finally got some pictures of us. I don’t care that much about the pictures, it’s the experience itself that you want to remember, but since it was my 30th birthday, I wanted to have at least one photo of us doing this and we don’t have any photos of our own from the waterfalls.

Both body and brain is still on vacation I think. Been so tired since we came back. We need another vacation to recover from our vacation, haha. Why is it always like that?
We had a great long weekend in Dominican Republic. So nice to get away from New York sometimes, and in this case it was a perfect escape for my birthday. I wished for palm trees and I got a lot of them. Perfect birthday celebration. My hubby knows how to spoil me ♥
By recommendations from friends, we decided to fly to Puerto Plata and then stay at a hotel in Cabarete on the east coast. When we first came to the airport they asked us to pay to enter the country. I’ve never experienced this before, and neither has Jim. So already from the very beginning we understood how poor this country is. And you do notice it a lot and it didn’t feel like the safest place to be. But it’s good to go to places like this too. Not a lot of culture there, but we still got a good sense of the country.
Before we went there I was told to eat at one of the restaurants by the beach, order mojitos and then go out dancing at night. Since we had decided on all inclusive for this short trip, we didn’t feel like spending time and money to walk on the beach to find something safe and good. And we like to get up early in the morning to enjoy the hours of sun so after 8pm when it was dark, we were kinda ready to go to bed haha. I’m sure my friends experience in DR is a lot different since they travel with dominicans who knows where to go. We stayed at the hotel area for most of our trip except for on my birthday when we had a full day of adventures. If we had stayed for a full week or more, I’m sure our experience would have been different. But, I’m very pleased with our trip.